The Chamber of Subjection
by Unbearable Invention
Summary: Severus Snape is alone with his memories of Lily... or is he?  Time becomes more associative and less linear.  Reality is not what it used to be.   Please R&R at your leisure.
1. Chapter One: Our Lady of Flowers

**The Chamber of Subjection**

By Unbearable Invention

_"The time is out of joint." – Hamlet, Act 1 Scene 5_

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><p>Chapter One: Our Lady of Flowers<p>

I. I. I. You.

Muses make the anvils shriek, their arms mahoganied into membranes of darkness—a deep cadaverous darkness swelling in the soul of Severus Snape. –_Step away from the pensieve, Potter._ A hidden secret slithering its way from Spinner's End. But Harry. I. I See You. Moths of flame fireworking their way into the center of my sweltering desire, swollen in lavender: sanguine pain papers over the contingencies of an anachronistic pederastic desire: mementos of Lilly linger in these loins like sallow legs veiled in vines. How passé. Phaedrus scissoring through my mind as a single crippling thought penetrates deeply: I want you Harry. A martyr-like bulge between the intertwining shadows of my trousers: gored and gutted like St. Sebastian fucked by arrows: a wounded eyeball sliced with a razor: the ectoplasmic schoolboy opens his undulating spectral mouth. Lilly. Oh god, Lilly. Semen stains the blue variation of every fraudulent catastrophe: Lilly looks at me and licks her lips: fluids ooze from our pores as we become lost in hate-sex. –Oh, Lilly. I. I. I. Goddamn it. I will not touch him. I promised. Sunsweeping rims of friction: the sharpening horseflies of pain and residue of schoolchildren. No more eunuch despair. From bend of bay to veer of frothy sea, I will follow thee, Lilly: a sexual stillborn resuscitated from the etherized void of so many broken years pining for my ruined muse.

–Harry, I said step _away_ from the pensieve.

Challenge the demarcation between you and I: spheres splinter into driftwood as corporeal containers swallow the sea or the sea swallows me. –I didn't see anything, sir. I-It was an accident. Ramses fissures boy frontal.

-Get out, Potter. Get _out_.

Contagion. Mitochondrial memories: the residue left by Lilly Potter: lips like lavender and November. The marauders circle me like dementors. –Stop it, James. Leave him alone! A phantom child mouths psalms inside my belly: he learns to drink the thunder. Harry, I mouth the word to myself. That is who he-is-will-be. Snape gazes at me: pale canopied skin swathed in invisible bandages. Swollen sarcophagus-esque breasts: hooveprints of milk gather like silent apophyllite: the milk of redemption hides in her like invisible tumors. Oooooooooo, Sirius discharged, speaking seventeen electronic words as he orgasmed. Snape's deformed penis pukes black sperm as it caterwauls like a bleating lamb inside my agnostic womb. Blood and semen intertwine on the pale wreckage of my thighs. Bristles of pubic hair embrace like octopus tentacles. –James. Wait. No, not James. Not this time. Now it's you. Severus. He frowns: his face an inverted skull sulkily staring into the ceiling as he absently twists my nipples into a rouge powder. Lavender. Contagion.

-What shall we name our child? Snape asks Lilly.

-_Haaaaaarry_.

-W-What? Harry asks.

-The Polyjuice Potion. You stole it. Harry. You stole it.

-I promise, I did not, sir.

-Contagion, Potter. _Contaaaagion_. I say to him.

Limbless curses: a fading tattoo little more than a gnat-netted reminder of Death Eaters lost in the purgatorial past I too often try to forget. I am. Will be. –Make love to me, Lilly commanded, from behind. I want to feel the vermillion feast festering inside of me. The rectal blossom blurs like an old photograph: slow and lugubrious thrusts challenge the static ontology of you and I as her narrow pink pathway momentarily doubles as an early grave. I feel remorseful, calling her a Mudblood so many years ago: she turned away, and went to him: an unexpected tightness as I burst into a silent scream: Harry is a verb that needs the dramatic flourish of an Elizabethan actor as I discard the stories of his absentee father. The broom closet cloistered as an angel-headed ulcer. My wand pointed at his porcelain face. Killing words lingering on my lips. Now. You're all I have left. Open wide and give us a kiss.

-Have you ever read Death in Venice? I ask him.

-What?

-A masterpiece of Muggle ingenuity. Thomas Mann. A classic story. But, aaaaah, Harry, I must tell you: I am no Aschenbach. I am not some juvenile neo-Platonist—some withered old eunuch groping for god on the seashore. And I do not make love, Harry. I fuck. I fuck with hate in my heart.

The dementor leans forward: a puff of Pettigrew wafts off its befouled shit breath. No. Not now. –_Yeeeeeeessssss_. My fear stinks of stillborn hexes: the pensieve glistens in the moonlight: I make love to Lilly in a prism of starlight and semen: a kudzu-colored gartersnake descends from Harry's throat as I scream, -Polyjuice Potion! Where is it? The Dark Lord gestures at the mangled body of a woman. –Dead or alive, he says to me. –She will know my seed, Severus, and she shall know the throbbing gristle of pain and desire. Libidos blue: his vulture-belly full with the sins of an intersecting past and future. No. Not now. _Not this kiss._ Not from you. Lavender. Contagion. Secret.

[to be continued]


	2. Chapter Two: The Immoralist

**The Chamber of Subjection**

By Unbearable Invention

_"Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact."_ – Judith Butler

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><p>Chapter Two: The Immoralist<p>

A cold clitoris wreathed in chrysanthemums: the borders of her geometric body lost in the wintering frost of Hogwart's secret chamber: her body glows with a cistercian pallor as it lies on the cobble-stone floor: two copper coins cover her eyes: the whiskey of her sex drained from sunstained skin and constellations of red-brown lacerations pucker on her skin like toothless mouths: her nakedness murders the moon with magicks made of mercury and quicksilver. –An exquisite corpse, Voldemort says. –Lily Evans-Snape. Your wife. Now dead. Snape turns away and I motion toward the Dementors. –I killed her, I tell Snape. –And now I'm bored. Entertain me, Severus, and prove that you are more loyal than Pettigrew. Make love to her corpse, Severus, and let me watch. _Lily. My wife. _Black hair cascades like a veil of wounded starlings: limbs like old cedars tangling into knots: a boy stares at me with her eyes: apocryphal stories of Penthesilea and Achilles: obsidian ice frosting in my stomach: Harry is impatient and ready for his lesson. Opening. Longing. Occulemency.

–Occulemency. That is our lesson, I say to Harry. –To protect the mind from the blade that dares to cut internally. To keep the barbarians at the gates. To shroud oneself behind the veil. Prince Gallant and his shining steed, I think: wriggling maggots worm out her stygian lips as I kiss her, oh god, I kiss her.

The twitch of swollen velvet: the seam in Lilly's skirt slashed in a self-conscious _rrrrrriiipppp_: our bodies moved like sheaths of wheat as we made love: our wedding vows half-remembered and the convex mirror reflects only what it chooses to see: my hand moves between porcelain legs and fingers spread like a peacock's tail. –Oh, Lily, I say to her. –I love you. But I know this isn't real.

–Reality is subjective, Lily tells me and I believe her.

–I speak of power, Harry. Power: the structures of power determine _and_ destroy the foundational self: we are governed and disciplined by power: it acts through us but, in a transitive sense, enacts us into being. The agency we possess is the effect of subordination. I say this to Harry, but do not believe it. – To deny this fact is to risk a sense of the self that is defined by normative and intelligible boundaries: the self that is defined through subordination. To do otherwise would spoil our ontological status as an 'I.' His knees as pale and pink as a blood-smeared seagull garroted and left to die on a seashore: stories embroidered on my skull: narratives of a postlapsarian encounter where menstrual blood stains my lips like a honeyed nectar: fingerformed constellation dotting Harry's supple throat like phantoms: fantasies of his ruined face covered in bloodied hyacinths and the exquisite tenderness of his narrow torso wounded into a purpling knot of hate: the rectal blossom wreathed with red ribbons.

-Remember this: we are constituted in power but can never wield it.

-Wield _what_?

-Power, I repeated. The smell of his sex and fantasies of diamond-paned flesh: hours pass: twisted bed-sheets: sharp breaths: a restless hand moving downdowndown until the swift, vesuvian orgasm: ectoplasmic memories of Harry immobilized like marble sculpture: pathetic, I think to myself, like Alcibiades drunk with desire: two eyeballs emerge from the obsidian shadow of my room: the ghost of a girl with green, almond-shaped eyes begins to weep as she stares at my pathetic, seminude body: flaccid and full of shame. Phantoms in the wall. Openings. Legs. Lilly.

-Lily. Lily. I'm sorry. I can't help it. But I promise, I will not touch him!

Diaphanous whisper. –Watch over him, Severus.

-What shall we name our child? Snape asks as he presses his ear to my pregnant stomach.

-No names. I say. Names are necessary for self-narration, and stories slash at the throat with a ruined blade.

_Please, Lord Voldemort, anything but this! Please do not ask this of me! Oh, please do not ask this of me!_

[to be continued]


End file.
